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Monday, August 14, 2017

DIY Augmented Reality - 3 Ways To Use It In School

Disclosure: Metaverse is a new advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com

Metaverse is an amazing platform that brings that for the first time enables anyone to create rich augmented reality experiences. In many ways the capabilities within Metaverse remind me of the early days of Minecraft (before it was sold to Microsoft) except that instead of creating games and experiences that only exist on your computer's screen Metaverse lets you create experiences that exist in augmented reality. What does that mean? It means that can create games, quests, and other activities that are completed by locating digital artifacts in a physical world. In other words, you could create your own educational version of Pokemon Go.

Create augmented reality scavenger hunts for historical landmarks in your community. You can make this as simple or as complex an activity as you want it to be. Start by giving players a clue to the first landmark then when they arrive at the landmark they can use the Metaverse app to see if they're in the right place, to learn more about landmark (you can make videos and animations play when people get to the right place), and answer questions to get a clue for the location of the next landmark.

Have students develop augmented reality choose-your-own adventure stories. Have students first write their stories and the possible paths that readers can take in the story. Then have students use Metaverse Studio to put the story into an interactive format that readers can follow on their phones. In the process of using Metaverse Studio students will have to verify that the logic blocks that they use will correctly lead followers from one scenario to the next. Students' stories can be location based or be location-independent.

This last idea is a fun one for the first day or school or any other time that you need an ice-breaker activity. Google Vision is one of the logic blocks within the Metaverse Studio. With Google Vision in Metaverse Studio you can create an app that detects if someone is smiling or not. See this logic block illustrated in the video below then read on for my idea on how to use this as an ice-breaker.

I think it would be fun to create an ice-breaker activity that has people snap a picture of a person's face either smiling or not smiling. Then have the app prompt the user to ask, "why are you smiling on the first day of school?" or "why are you frowning? Can I do something to make you smile?"

Disclosure: I tried Metaverse earlier this summer on my own, loved it, and brought it to a couple of workshops. Since then Metaverse approached me about advertising on FreeTech4Teachers.com and I was excited to help them reach more teachers. Everything you read here is my writing.